


morose monument

by swagcat9000



Category: No Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 08:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14469186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swagcat9000/pseuds/swagcat9000
Summary: uhhh a shitty thing i wrote with a hard to understand format lol and gay shit. enjoy, kid gorgeous.





	morose monument

The huge, flat surface of Lake Superior (except when punctuated by choppy water) was an expansive bleak-black grey. For me, stormy days were the most peaceful, because when the tide gently tiptoed on the shores, the lake-where I came to seek refuge- smoothed to a silkscreen. As I stare across the water, my mind projects onto the water the film reels of my past, and on days like that, it’s almost as though I never left.  
My desk surrounded me in the perfectly circular room, strewn with journals, logbooks, puzzles, and drawings. Those distractions kept my eyes out of the water, and the record player, with its long cord twirling down the spiral staircase, kept me out of my own mind. To be “out of your mind” is negative, considered to be crazy, but for me, it’s better to keep out.  
The music and writing helps, but it’s not a cure-all. A lingering gaze, perhaps caused by a bird or fish directing my attention to the water, and then I’m drowning again.  
Damn you. Worthless piece of shit. Kill yourself. You’ll never be anyone, you’ll always be useless. Fuck you. I’d be happier if you weren’t here. Go die. Stand in the corner, cry your eyes out till tears won’t come anymore so I can make you cry all over again. Now calm down before I get angrier and go to bed. Remember, I love you, goodnight.  
The record ends and the needle screeches against the label, and I cough the water from my lungs and put on another album. Dishes clatter downstairs, and I’m back in my lonely lighthouse.  
Sometimes he cooks dinner for me, and sometimes I cook for him. Occasionally, neither of us do anything, and dinner is a walk on the beach, holding hands with him is sweet enough for dessert. If the mood is right-bored with everything else, too tired to talk, done with everything to be done, idle-we watch some TV or a movie in the tiny-tinny room where the high pitched hum of electricity amplifies against the wood paneling. Those nights, pressed together, until I can’t stay awake so I sleep without thought. Those nights, where his warmth brings me back to life.  
But it can’t be like that all the time, the passing weeks, I lose myself when he’s not there. Sometimes, when writing, I stop a moment. A semicolon or comma, a period or space, think, and in that instant of thought I find my nails are too long and I’m back.  
The long fingernails, in my face, barely an inch from my eyes. The feeling of that claw, piercing my skull, raking through my thoughts, memories, until they admit her truth. A pointed finger, prodding, poking, until my reality bent to her will.  
Liar.  
A pointed finger in my face, the sharp nail inside of my mind, bringing forth the visceral, the tears, an uncontrollable shaking in protest, and when it was finally over, my head rang like a brass bowl, dropped and empty.  
Facts are only as true as you make them.  
Back in the world, my own fingernails, forced into the palms of my hands. I stare down at the ugly red crescents stamped on my skin, and take the pain as an indication I’m still alive. Uncertainty, if that’s even for the better.  
The longest he’s ever been gone was a week.  
He has a normal job, managing a grocery store, but his employees are smart and mostly manage themselves. I don’t know why he puts up with me: a recluse in a lighthouse that’s catatonic half the time he’s not asleep. But he does, and he puts food on the table, despite my offering nothing in return.  
I don’t even do anything. This lighthouse exists in the capacity of privately owned property, the boats don’t follow its light anymore, I just live here. Yet each day, I log the weather, the barometer’s measurement, and other bits of information, for no reason at all. I don’t know if I can read any of these instruments properly. It’s something, though.  
The week he left was for a family reunion further south, and I was alone for that week. I started off trying to remain calm and functional, but I fell apart faster than I’d like to admit.  
The first day, I woke up and he was gone, so I put on one of his sweaters he’d left behind in the clothes basket and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. On the counter, a note.  
“Breakfast for the week in the oven.” it read, and a drawing of a heart.  
There was a huge pot of oatmeal, streaks of brown sugar mixed in. “Breakfast for the week,” I thought, “or breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two days?”  
I ran out of oatmeal by the third morning, and I didn’t eat for the rest of the week.  
By the time he got back, he found me laying in our bed, staring at the ceiling, without him there, I found no point to do anything but that. His silhouette appeared in the doorway, before he quietly slipped into the room and into bed next to me, without a word.  
I fell asleep with him, curled together, and didn’t say anything about how much time I had spent that week doing a given activity. Sleeping, not enough. Eating, not enough. Sitting outside of the lighthouse, looking over the guardrail, too much. Stupid, stupid, I’d think, every time I climbed up there, stared at the ground below, before storming back to bed. I’m too weak to hoist myself over the railing, much less jump. So I stare at the ceiling instead, at the crisscrosses of cracks in the plaster, until the motivation to go back upstairs and contemplate hits again.  
When we woke up, the sun shone through the window, the slant indicated it was near midday. I heard him sit up, leant against the battered headboard I’ve had since I moved here.  
The day my grandfather died was the last day of summer. I was supposed to start college that Monday, but instead, I sat front-row at his funeral instead of front-row in a lecture hall. In the cemetery, the insects sang mockingly. The trees, glowing with the last kisses of summer sun, spat upon his grave.  
I didn’t open the envelope for a month and a half.  
That crazy old man, as explained during the reading of the will, had randomized his assets, the deeds and certificates, to be divided among his immediate family. I took my share home and stuck it under my mattress until the fog cleared enough to read it.  
He had willed me his old vacation home, up north, an island that was scarcely fifty meters off the coast, upon which stood a solitary lighthouse, a grand, old structure he had inherited and outfitted with more modern amenities such as running water and electricity. Having missed more than the first month of school, I forgot about it and moved into the monument.  
The late-october lakeside weather didn’t deter me, I hardly considered the waves and gales. I waited for everyone in that house to leave, then packed my things in a rental van and left. Some clothes (mostly sweaters), gifts from friends, old pictures, journals. On the way out of town, I stopped at my dad’s workplace. We ate lunch together and walked around on the grounds, talking.  
Eventually, we ended up back at his office, and I gave him a hug goodbye. He’s the only one who I cared to say goodbye to.  
Five or six hours later, at the lighthouse, I checked out my property. It was in need of some fixing-up, but altogether, was lovely.  
I walked out of the kitchen and onto the balcony there, facing the ocean. Choppy water pulsed below the rail, it wasn’t crashing. Just rising, falling, like thousands of breathing creatures huddled together. Lazily, foot-long fish drifted under the surface, letting the water carry them where it desired. I wondered how deep it was, thinking about the song The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald. “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.”  
That evening, I slept on the damp couch in the room that’s currently the TV room. It was structurally sound with no leaking problems, only two shattered window panes that let in just enough water to make it a freezing cold night.  
But now, that window’s fixed. Sunlight soaks into our bedroom on clear mornings like this, it might be a good day for a walk along the shores. I looked at him in bed next to me. He rubbed his eyes, smiled, and said “Good morning.”  
Like the first day we met.  
“Good morning! How may I help you today?” he asked brightly. Then, he was a greeter for the store instead of manager.  
It was around six in the morning when I walked in and squinted in the bright fluorescent lights, and I probably made a terrible first impression. I had spent a night on a musty couch in the clothes I wore the day before. Bedhead and all, with no efforts to fix my appearance, I ventured out of the lighthouse and wound up there, buying a box of crackers, a few toiletries I had forgotten, and a self-serve cup of coffee.  
I ambled through the aisles a few times over, not deciding on anything, and went to pay for my things. The same greeter walked away from his post and began ringing me up.  
“Hope you found everything okay today.”  
I nodded in response.  
He scanned a few more items quietly.  
“So, you’re new around here.” he stated.  
“How’d you guess?” I was referencing my style and mannerism that was out-of-place in a quaint lakeside town such as this.  
“It’s the off season, and nobody here has anything to do between Labor Day and Easter. About seven months of sloth, so it’s odd to see someone up so early.”  
“I guess.”  
“Well, am I wrong?”  
“No.”  
“So what are you doing up here? Visiting family?” he asked.  
“You could say that.”  
“God, you’re cryptic. What, you’re having a get-together with some older relatives that isn’t so much “visiting”, more like “getting them glasses of prune juice and checking that they’re still alive”?”  
“I just moved into that white lighthouse.” I monotoned. “My grandfather left it to me.”  
He raised his eyebrows and looked at the label on the coffee, punching some code into the register.  
“I’m sorry for your loss.” He handed me the paper cup and the grocery bag. “Anyways, have a nice day.”  
Every day, I went in for coffee, sometimes buying food, but always seeing him. I typically arrived earlier in the morning, but depending on how convoluted my sleep schedule became, that time could vary wildly, until the one day I didn’t come in.  
I don’t know what happened, but from the story I heard about myself, I fainted in the middle of the road and woke up in the town doctor’s office after someone found me. It had been a rainy day, and I postulated that I might have slipped on the wet cobblestone and bumped my head. The doctor said that wasn’t the case, he had taken my blood pressure and thought it was too low, then sent me home with a prescription I could have written myself: eat more, get bed rest.  
He held the door for me on the way out, extended his hand in a gesture of “after you”. I stepped out to the street, and her monsterous arms wrapped around me.  
The bottom of the stairs to her bedroom. Let’s go upstairs, she said. I go. The yelling was finally over, I’d get to go to bed. A moment of trust. She grabs me, yanks me closer, and muffles my horrified scream with her palm clamped over my mouth, hard. I’m so scared and too weak to do anything else. I bite down on what I can, and she freezes me there, trapped in her strangling hug. That moment of trust, shattered in an instant. My breath hitches in my throat and it hurts like I’ve swallowed a shard of glass. Point taken.  
“Sir, are you okay?” the doctor interjects.  
I’m staring into the gutter, standing in the rain.  
“I’m fine.”  
He didn’t ask if I had a ride home, so I walked back to the lighthouse in the rain and slept on my couch. It had dried out since I patched up the window and pulled an old space heater out of the storage room. I knew how the breakers worked, but not how to power up a furnace.  
I was awakened by a knocking at the door, but after the initial startle, I closed my eyes again. Another knock, and I kept them closed. A minute or two of silence, before the old, creaky doorknob began to rattle, and someone walked into my house. I almost got up, but figured that if I was going to be stabbed, today might as well be the day.  
“Hey, you okay? Um… I don’t know, you never told me your name.”  
I sat up and glared at him. He kept talking.  
“Anyways, you never showed up today, and you always look kinda out of it. So I got worried and came to check on you.”  
“Why?” I asked.  
“Well, I guess it’s a weird bond between employees and regulars. I see you every day, and it was out-of-sorts for you to not be there. I don’t know. Why don’t you buy a bunch of groceries at once and use them during the week instead of buying what you need for the day?”  
“I don’t know. Spontaneity.”  
He smiled. “For some reason, you don’t give me the most spontaneous vibe.”  
“You’d be surprised.” I put my feet on the floor. “I need some food.”  
I went into the kitchen and he followed me. I turned around in the threshold, and spotted him looking around the few rooms.  
“You’re living here?” he asked, incredulous.  
“Yeah, so?”  
“It’s kind of...” he paused. I could tell he was choosing his words carefully, so as to not offend me. “Not that homey.”  
“I just moved in.”  
“The first time I saw you was probably a month ago.” he crossed his arms across his chest and raised his eyebrows.  
I just sighed and got some saltines down from the highest shelf.  
I had no concept of the passing of time, days were just days and whether it was Wednesday or November was obsolete, but as we reminisced about that day, I learned it was a Saturday morning.  
I was sitting up on top of the lighthouse, reading some trashy romance novel I found in the freebie section of the library, when he materialized behind me, said something, and I startled.  
“Jesus Christ, don’t do that!” I shouted, then lowered my voice. “What did you say?”  
“Sorry, I asked if you wanted to go shopping.”  
My eyes narrowed. “Shopping for what?”  
He drove me to a cheap furniture store a few towns over.  
“If you don’t have money, I’ll spot you a few bucks. You shouldn’t be living the way you are.” he said, passing me a little sheet of paper. I unfolded it and looked it over, a list: mattress, bedframe, linens, kitchen table, chairs, dresser.  
I rejected his offer, but kept the list.  
“I have money, you know.” I forced.  
“I don’t know what your financial situation is, but if you need help, I’m willing to give it. That’s all I’m saying, I’m not making any assumptions.”  
I turned away from him and stared over the dashboard.  
“So, do you want to go in?” he interrupted before I could offer a response.  
A few hours later, after sundown, we sat at my new kitchen table eating pizza he had ordered from the solitary pizza parlor in the area. I hadn’t realized how ravenous I was, but I had wolfed down a slice and a half before I stopped to take a breath.  
“Thanks for all this.” I said into the silence.  
“It’s only like fifteen bucks, you know. More expensive than in the cities, but not that bad.”  
“No, idiot. Today. Making me get a table and bed and stuff like that.”  
His face shifted from a slightly offended confusion to a stifled smile.  
“It’s no problem.”  
He left a few minutes later and this time, I walked him to the door instead of letting him find his way out, and as he stepped over the threshold, I stopped him.  
“Wait, can I ask you something?” I didn’t let him answer. “Why did you do this?”  
He stood there a while, and for all I know, it could have been a few moments, it could have been fifteen minutes, but eventually he spoke.  
“I don’t know. You’re at the store every day, I guess having a regular customer forms kind of a weird bond, and it didn’t feel right for me to see you sleeping on an old couch.”  
I couldn’t formulate a response to that, but I desperately grasped to find something to say.  
“Goodnight.”  
And without saying anything else, he walked back to his car and drove away. That night, I slept in a real bed for the first time in over a month, and it was the most peaceful sleep I’d had in an impossibly long time.  
It became a routine. I’d go in and buy my coffee and see him every day, and we talked, sometimes for longer than it took to punch in the size of my drink, press “Finish and Pay”, and for me to swipe my card. And soon, he stopped charging me.  
He came to the lighthouse every Saturday, and it started becoming more of a home. Decorations, a television, he figured out how to get the heat on, and the place started smelling less like lakewater and death, more like burning candles and clean sheets.  
It was getting late, we hadn’t gone to the furniture store that day, just stayed in watching movies, I had drifted off a few times and finally sat up on the couch to remain awake. I stretched, most of my joints cracking as I moved.  
He glanced away from the TV for a moment, then looked back to me, smiling a bit.  
“Why are you staring at me?” I demanded.  
“Wow, you’re pissy when you’ve just woken up.” he remarked. “Not to be hurtful, but you’ve got the worst case of bedhead I’ve ever seen.”  
“Really?” I reached up and ran my fingers through my hair. “Where?”  
“Seriously, it looks like someone spray-painted a bird’s nest gold. Right here.”  
He placed his hand just above where the ends of my hair met my neck, his touch like drops of sunshine, glowing, his middle finger snagging a tangled bit and yanking as he tried to pull away. Though it wasn’t even bad, I’d experienced far worse, that bit of pain he caused was too close to the past.  
“You’re completely fucking disgusting. What, were you raised in a barn?”  
She’s ripping at my scalp like razors.  
I’m abhorrent, I’m a dirty animal.  
Pulling and tugging at a matted piece of hair on the back of my head.  
“Maybe we should just shave your entire head, that would be easier, wouldn’t it?”  
Maybe I should just swallow all of your pills at once, that would be easier, wouldn’t it?  
“I’m glad you’re burning, you deserve the pain, it’s your fault anyways, isn’t it, you bastard?”  
It’s my fault, I know, please leave me alone.  
I jolted away from him as though he’d stabbed me. He looked confused and upset.  
“What happened, did I hurt you?”  
I rubbed the spot he’d touched, jerking my head from side to side, shaking off the way she felt.  
“I’m… fine.” I choked out.  
“You sure? I just kinda touched you and you flinched really badly.”  
“I’m okay.”  
He stared at me with an expression that said, “I don’t believe you, but that’s alright.”  
“You do know I worry about you, quite a lot, actually?”  
“Don’t say that. I’m some weird reclusive dropout living in a lighthouse. Not even a dropout, I never even dropped in.”  
“You can’t stop me from worrying. When you’re walking around the store, you’re practically a ghost. There’s something empty in your eyes, you’re there physically, but your thoughts are a million miles away.”  
He sighed, grabbing my hand and shifting so we were face-to-face.  
“Listen, you need to take care of yourself. You look like you’re going to drop dead at any moment, and like you haven’t slept in a week at all times.”  
I pulled away. “Why do you care? If I ‘look like I’m going to drop dead’, why would you put effort into knowing me before I do it?”  
“I grew up here, in this small town, and I’ve hardly ever left. You’re not from around here, and I guess I latched on to a little bit of the outside world.”  
“It is really weird to live here. The twenty-four/seven halcyon of living in a vacation town is kind of suffocating, in a strange, good way.”  
“Maybe you’re a breath of fresh air I needed.” he remarked.  
“Okay, shut up.” I laughed, pulling a blanket over myself.  
Currently, I walked the grounds of the island. The lighthouse stood tall above me like the steeple of a mausoleum, watching me as I went out to the garden and closed all of the windows on the greenhouse, in preparation for the incoming storm. I licked my thumb and smeared it across the first item written in black ink on my arm: secure greenhouse.  
When I first wake up in the morning, it’s to him delicately inscribing the things I’d do today to have a sense of productiveness. My skin is like a sheet of notebook paper, so the to-do list is always written neatly between the lines. It was better than a cup of coffee to feel his warm, glowing skin against my ashen grey.  
October turned to November, and the lake blew cold gales that shredded through the black canvas jacket I always wore. He decided we’d go out on a trip through the town that, in my couple months there, I’d hardly explored. I knew the way to the grocery store he now managed, had a passing knowledge of how to navigate home from the doctor’s office, but that was about it.  
The town was a little bit bigger than I expected, but it was still tiny. There was an apple orchard, the trees standing empty, completely devoid of leaves and apples, but on the property there was a few houses that looked alive, lights beaming through the fog.  
It was an bizarrely intimate thing, the way he reminisced about the town. Though he sometimes acted disdainful of everything here, it was clear he loved the place. He told me about the breakfast restaurant with grass and goats on its roof where his dad and him go to eat every other Sunday or so. There was a little art exhibition center, built on an old dock, with hundreds of names and messages vandalized on the outside, old sketches, sculptures, and paintings on the inside. We quietly stepped between the displays of artwork, hands brushing against each other more than they normally did when we walked together.  
The cemetery behind an antique store was beautifully horrifying. The headstones had varying degrees of decay-some of them crisp, making my stomach pitch when I noticed that the birth and deathdates on the stone were only four years apart. The older ones made me feel odd in a different way- the gravestones were too old to be read, covered in upwards of one hundred-fifty years worth of moss.  
I struggled to make out the letters- these were the memorials to these people that lived and died here. It was frustrating, as though me, knowing the name of a person I never met, never had the chance to meet, would change the inconsequentiality of their deaths. It felt like maybe, if I could just read their name, they’d know they weren’t forgotten.  
But we had more things to see that day, so we left before I could figure it out.  
The final memory we visited was an old schoolhouse. I tried pushing open the door, but I couldn’t get it to budge.  
“It’s locked.” I said, jiggling the handle.  
He grabbed it and turned it sharply, and with a recordscratch sound, it popped open.  
“Maybe it’s just you that can’t open doors.” he teased.  
We walked side by side through the dusty, singular hallway, down to one of the rooms.  
“So, this was the first six years of my school career.”  
Inside, posters dangled from the walls, if the tape hadn’t already given out. All of the desks were pushed to one side of the room, and everything was eerily untouched.  
“My class was the last to graduate from this elementary school.” he explained, going up to the wall. “Yeah, check it out, the teacher marked our heights here at the beginning and end of the year.”  
His initials were scratched onto the wall in pencil on a line, and a similar mark sat about an inch and a half higher. I looked up at him, comparing how tall he was now to then.  
“You’ve grown a lot.” I observed.  
“Do you really think so?” he laughed caustically. “Yeah, eight year’s difference will do that to a guy.”  
“You’re nineteen?”  
“Yes?”  
I smirked. “Ha, I’m eighteen and still taller than you.”  
He stood from where he was bent, checking out the remaining few books on the rickety bookshelf.  
“Wow, disrespecting your elders like that?” he walked up to me and started measuring his height to mine. “See, only a difference of like, one inch.”  
“No, no, it’s more like two, right?”  
Face to face, I straightened up and dropped my shoulders.  
“Look, that’s two inches.”  
“You’re wearing boots with heels, that’s cheating.” He stood up on his tiptoes, slightly higher than me, and his foot buckled beneath him. He caught himself on my shoulders, and resumed his triumphant height.  
“That’s more like it. And besides, I’m older, you’re taller, doesn’t that kinda balance out?”  
I didn’t have anything witty to say to that, so I just shrugged.  
He dropped down to his regular height, but kept his hands where they were. The prolonged eye contact made me feel awkward, so I looked out the dirty window. The sunset was pink, I gazed at the pastel divide between sky and freshwater.  
“Hey.”  
He touched the side of my face, my barren skin coming apart under his fingertips. I’d been slapped and shoved around, but his feather-light touch broke me more than the abuse.  
I tore my eyes from outside, looked at him, he pulled me closer and kissed me.  
In the darkness behind my eyes, the only thing I could feel was him, his lips against mine, and the world crumbling down around us. The wind blew down the schoolhouse walls, the lighthouse crashed into the lake, the town was stripped from the land, the earth falling prey to galactic winds, only us, alone, standing together on the single sliver of planet that remained.  
The kiss ended and the world fell back into place, but the feeling stayed put.  
By the holidays, him and I were in love.  
It wasn’t always perfect, and he slowly uncovered my past when he noticed me collapsing backwards into my own thoughts.  
He’d kiss me, put an arm around me and let it drop to the small of my back. I’d remember the way she forced me into the corner, how that touch felt, and I’d have to stop, take a shower, and try to scrub her off of me again.  
Or we’d be in the hallway and his hands would slip out from under my shirt, avoiding the patches of skin that sicken me to be touched, and grab hold of my belt loop, not knowing that’s how she used to make me stay when I tried to get away from her, if only for a few minutes.  
I love him, and he takes care of me more than anyone else ever has, but she’s still here.  
I moved to the lighthouse to escape, but the shift in geography hasn’t completely freed me. She’s still here, in my genetics, and I’ll never be able extricate that tie to her. And in my head, the little things that make me go back home to where it happened.  
I deal with it, the things she did, but I’ll never be entirely free, I try to come to terms with it, but, despite my running away, she still keeps coming back, still has me teetering on the same edge I’ve always been.


End file.
